This is a freeware PC DOS game Zeroth Zone highly *inspired* by the horizontal scrolling arcade classic known as "Scramble". It is not intended to be an exact copy of Scramble. For instance, you will not gain anything by shooting the fuel tanks, instead you must pick them up by touching them with your space ship.

Also, 0z is in no way intended to be a revolution in the gaming industry, a fact which is proven by the lack of good sound effects and graphics. And programming. The purposes of the game are to:

1. Show our admiration for the classic arcade game.
2. Practice general PC game programming techniques.
3. Ressurect our ancient game programming ideas.

The aim of 0z is as something like this: Do your best to navigate your spaceship through six alien landscapes in order to reach the zeroth zone without getting killed. There are a total of six zones (counting the zeroth) which include a small variety of dangers such as missiles and asteroids. If you reach the end of the zeroth zone, you have "won".

You have three ships to play with. If you get low on fuel you must fill the tank by picking up fuel tanks - not shooting them as you do in the old Scramble. If you lose a ship, you will have to restart the last zone in which you crashed. Lose them all and the fun ends. Game over. 

Controls

Keyboard or joystick. For keyboard controls, use arrow keys and SPACE for fire and CTRL for bombing. For joystick, use one fire button for normal fire, and the other button for bombing. Errr..something like that!

Installation & Starting

Windows 3.x/95/98/NT:
1. Unzip the 0z.zip file into a separate folder.
2. Open the Zeroth Zone folder
3. Click on the 0z.exe file to start the game.

DOS:
1. Unzip the 0z.zip file into a separate folder.
2. Go to the folder which contain all the Zeroth Zone files
3. Run 0z.exe.

Requirements

Works fine in DOS/Win95 environment on a PC Pentium 166MHz, 32MB mem, SB compatible sound card and a cheap SVGA card. Should work fine on most Pentium PC's!

0z has been tested on a crap PC (specs above) as well as a more descent PC PII 450Mhz 128MB Ram, Viper 550, SB 64. The only thing is that the music sounds worse on the new PC while the sounds effects are the same. Why???

Apart from these two machines, 0z has now also been tested on four other PCs - all successfully! The only thing which is noticable is a little bit of screen flicker on slow machines.

Distributive size: 255K Windows-95,98,ME,2000,XP,NT

Free download game Zeroth Zone